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From August 21-25, I had the tremendous pleasure of participating in the ELV Summer School for Literary Translation in Utrecht. This year, the week-long intensive course put the spotlight on three languages into which there is a growing demand for translated Dutch literature: French, Turkish and English. As English translators, we learned all about intertextuality, translator agency, and unravelling the layers of difficult texts in masterclasses with award-winning translators Susan Massotty, Sam Garrett and Michele Hutchinson.

This past Spring, I had the pleasure of working with Elbert Arens, essay writer for Dutch architect Frits van Dongen, on their new retrospective book Frits van Dongen: 25 years, 25 works. The beautiful, shiny red volume is published by Spain’s TC Cuadernos, translated into Spanish and English. The project turned out to be a trilingual collaboration: I translated Arens’s architecture essays from Dutch to English, which were then translated into Spanish. Both translations are printed side-by-side for bilingual reading and accompanied by large, colorful images.

In the first half of 2017, I was commissioned by the Max Foundation to write their 2016 Annual Report. It was an enormous job, but the final result has been well worth the effort! Max Foundation is a wonderful Amsterdam-based NGO focused on providing clean water, sanitation and health services in South Asia and soon in Africa. You can read the Max Foundation 2016 Annual Report here!

This photo is what got me to theTranslator Made Corporeal event at the British Library in the first place. It was taken at the London Book Fair by photographer Julia Schoenstaedt as part of a portrait series revealing the rarely-seen faces behind literary translation. The project set the tone for the event, which aimed to investigate the “human, flesh-and-blood translator in a historical and cultural context.” As keynote speaker Jeremy Munday put it, a translator leaves a “linguistic footprint” that is inherently biased toward his or her world view. Their notes scribbled in page margins and correspondence with editors allow us to “taste and smell the literary creation process”.

Did you know that hormonal treatments for certain andrological conditions were available in Nazi Germany, or that long before Viagra, erectile dysfunctionwas treated with something called ‘Testifortan’? Neither did I until I translated “The Suppression of Sexual Science: effects on the professional development of andrology and sexual medicine” by Dirk Schultheiss from German for the European Association of Urology. My translation has been published in Urology under the Swastika...

Last Wednesday, we walked to the train station in The Hague and hopped the train to London. One stopover in Brussels and a few hours later, we stepped out at St. Pancras. Picadilly line to District line and I was walking into the London Book Fair. I arrived late in the afternoon, just in time to catch a few panels before the wine came out. Afterwards, the translators among us headed to The Blackbird at Earl’s Court for a pint.

As a translator, you constantly have to make decisions on what to do about these little things. Do you just translate them as they are and preserve the Belgian-ness of the book? Or do you convert them into something more familiar for your target readership? If you translate “hostie” to “satellite wafer”, are you then obliged to explain that it is a sort of puffy sugary disk with candy beads rattling inside? Would Americans appreciate encountering a “Rubbermaid” in a book they chose specifically for its foreign-ness?…

“Language is my way of getting a grip on things, of maintaining control in certain situations. Your body is bombarded with zillions of sensory impressions, and by giving them a name, you make them one-dimensional again, manageable,” wrote best-selling Belgian author Lize Spit in her second blog post for The Chronicles. Actually, this is my translation of what she wrote. What she wrote was this…

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the Drongo Talenfestival in Utrecht. I thought to myself, well, tickets are only €10, I’ll go have a look around. But I must say that it was much more than I expected! For a festival broadly focused on the many facets of the language industry in The Netherlands (an industry that can sometimes feel overly commercialized), I was really impressed by how informative and thought-provoking it was.

What I love most about French is the loose precision of its words. How a single word can refer to something so specific, yet conjure up so many other memories. To the English tongue, a French word can sound so vaguely familiar, as if you could have known it in a past life, but lost it somewhere down the line. In translation, you meet again. In his letters from exile, Victor Hugo wrote, “In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference…

I have asked Kristen to check my work and I must say the result is impressive! Both corrections and the service have been done in a professional manner... Kristen has been very flexible, truly adapting to my own work rhythm.

Christian AricoLausanne, Switzerland

Kristen is an extremely professional, competent and helpful proof-reader. I warmly recommend her.

Sara IadarolaFribourg, Switzerland

Kristen edited a very important paper for me and I was highly content with her work. She was quick and knew how to fit her corrections into my style of writing.

"Kristen was highly professional, very communicative and flexible concerning meetings, agendas and the logistics of translating texts....she has developed a high level of vocabulary in the professional field of architecture, urbanism and landscape architecture."- Elbert Arens, The Hague, The Netherlands